External Validity in Experiments
Many drawbacks can occur when following the experimental method. By the virtue of gaining enough control over the situation so as to randomly assign people to conditions and rule out the effects of extraneous variables, the situation can become somewhat artificial and distant from real life. There are two kinds of generalizability at issue:
- The extent to which we can generalize from the situation constructed by an experimenter to real-life situations (generalizability across situations), and
- The extent to which we can generalize from the people who participated in the experiment to people in general (generalizability across people)
Read more about this topic: External Validity
Famous quotes containing the words external, validity and/or experiments:
“My grief lies all within,
And these external manners of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
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There lies the substance.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
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“My experiments did not turn out quite like yours, Henry. But science, like love, has her little surprises.”
—William Hurlbut (1883–?)